On Feral
I was privileged to lead a game development studio that achieved landmark success in the children’s interactive space with our conservation-themed MMO Animal Jam. Launched in 2010 and intended for kids 8–12, it’s success was so enduring that it acquired (and still acquires) a secondary audience of parents, teens, and young adults.
The design behind the Feral project developed from conversations I had with older Animal Jam players, who often asked if WildWorks could make something “like AJ, but for older kids.” The average age of Animal Jam players had been rising since 2016, and I perceived an underserved demographic in kids — particularly girls — who’d aged out of the 8–12 year old Animal Jam range and wanted a non-toxic social role playing game better suited to teens. The high concept went something like this: Animal Jam let you become your favorite animal… but what if your favorite animal isn’t real? Feral was to be the older, edgier sibling of Animal Jam that united mythological animals drawn from all folds of human history.
WildWorks began development on Feral in 2018 with a $5M bridge loan from a lender I’ll call Chicago Capital (not their real name), our own funds, and a $1M investment from the MiSK foundation. WildWorks and its investors were working to close a $15M Series B equity investment in the company that would fully fund Feral through completion, launch, and the first year of live operations; the Chicago loan was intended only to be a bridge to enable development to start immediately. There was strong interest in the venture community for the funding round and I was confident it would close by the end of 2019.
Throughout the remainder of 2018 and 2019 a team of 25–30 developers worked full time on Feral, and by October 2019 we were ready to offer some “sneak peek” closed play tests. A community team for the game had been established, along with a vibrant and very active Discord channel. We launched a web page and survey in November 2019 for interested players to sign up for a closed beta test, which we anticipated launching in March 2020. Over 100k unique, validated email addresses signed up for the beta, demonstrating that we had an eager audience anticipating the game.
Meanwhile, in the summer of 2019 WildWorks signed a term sheet with a venture investor that included the planned $15M capital injection for the company. We worked steadily on the long-form agreement throughout the latter part of that year, and by mid-February 2020 we were close enough to signing that the fund’s principals flew to Salt Lake City for a celebratory dinner with our board. We anticipated a quick close to the deal, enabling us to pay off the Chicago loan early and accelerate Feral development with additional resources.
Among the topics of conversation at dinner that night were the alarming riots in Hong Kong and the emerging news of a possible coronavirus epidemic — two world events that would prove to be consequential for WildWorks and disastrous for Feral. Days after our dinner with the investors, we received word that their Hong Kong-based funds were frozen as they scrambled to transfer money out of the country in the midst of a Chinese government crackdown. I would need to fly to Switzerland the following week to finalize the deal there, where our investors would be setting up new banking relationships. A few days later, Covid-19 was declared a pandemic by the WHO, international travel was shut down, and the WildWorks studio went into lockdown.
We transitioned smoothly to remote work, losing only a day or two as the Feral team took their computer systems home and arranged to work remotely. The closed beta was launched on schedule on March 16, and we shared the following rollout plan with our partners and investors, which included aggressive marketing spend around the Early Access launch:
Despite the collapse of the Hong Kong investment deal, I remained optimistic that the strong community interest and engagement KPIs we were seeing from Feral would enable us to close with another investor as soon as pandemic restrictions lifted and business travel could resume. Of course, what I didn’t know was that travel restrictions would remain in place for the remainder of that year and most of 2021.
The absence of new capital to invest in Feral development began to show in design and rollout decisions. We resolved to delay the launch of the mobile version in favor of launching monetization in the Feral desktop game. Although the game wasn’t feature-complete, it was clear we couldn’t keep investing in Feral development at the current level without generating some revenue from the game. We launched our Season Pass monetization plan in the summer of 2020, with promising but unspectacular results. The game’s retention and engagement metrics were very strong; we saw numbers that met or exceeded the KPIs of Animal Jam at its best. Getting players to pay for the game in its current state, however, was proving more difficult.
Perhaps because the game was still officially in beta, players seemed reluctant to spend money in it, fearing that despite our reassurances their virtual items wouldn’t be preserved when Feral went into full release. The state of Feral at this time was a beautiful and unique virtual world with avatar characters drawn from folklore and mythology, prominently featuring a very robust character customization interface. Some minigames and interactive NPCs were present in the world, and we began to tease elements of the game’s narrative and the story-driven mission structure to come. Those elements were not yet reflected in gameplay, however, and players in Discord were critical of our decision to charge for premium content while still in beta.
In retrospect, the decision to monetize the game while in beta was a major mistake that contributed significantly to the game’s eventual failure. The decision was compelled by the need for revenue to continue funding development, but it set the stage for future discontent within the player community.
Still, the player base grew steadily, putting pressure on the community team to keep up with feature requests, bug reports, and Discord engagement. We had been fortunate during development to hire A.K. as our community manager (I omit their name here in deference to their family, but Feral players will recognize them immediately). A.K. was a hit with the player community immediately; keeping them informed and excited, relaying player feedback to the team, and spending hours each day in the game and on Discord interacting with citizens of City Fera.
We launched three Season Pass iterations in 2020, as well as several premium avatars, but the cracks in the game were showing. WildWorks lost critical staff during the pandemic as senior developers left to work remotely for larger studios. The need for cash drove us to release features before they were complete and polished, and launch new Season Pass drops before they were fully tested and balanced. The conversion rate of free players to purchasers was always very weak — under 2% — and our rush to deploy new content we could monetize resulted in critical bugs and poor framerate; issues we didn’t have the resources to promptly address.
We continued releasing new Feral premium content, but the impact of key staff departures was increasing exponentially. Recruiting and retaining comparable people during the quarantine proved impossible. We were always a small studio, and we couldn’t compete with the offers candidates were getting from major games industry players staffing up with remote workers at that time (jobs that have unfortunately been eliminated since, because many companies radically overstaffed in response to quarantine-driven game metrics).
Bugs in the game multiplied, and the quality of new features and premium content declined. In order to keep players from burning through new content drops immediately, they were tied to a leveling system that required a lot of onerous in-game grinding. Discontent among players was growing, new player acquisition was stalled, and the game wasn’t monetizing at a self-sustaining rate. A singular bright spot during these difficulties was A.K. the community manager, however. They were struggling with some personal issues compounded by the quarantine, but they were a trusted, constant, upbeat voice in the Feral player community that kept players focused on the great things coming on the roadmap.
On the first of June, 2020, we learned from their family that A.K. had passed away in the most tragic circumstances imaginable. The news absolutely wrecked the WildWorks family. A.K. was much loved by all of us. And we feared that the news could have catastrophic consequences in the Feral player community, which included a lot of impressionable, often marginalized teens who were already suffering through pandemic isolation. After consulting with two psychiatrists with expertise in this area, I made the decision to withhold news of A.K.’s death — and in particular the nature of their passing— from players.
Nevertheless, A.K.’s sudden absence was devastating to the player community. While WildWorks had been struggling to raise new capital and hold on to key staff needed to complete Feral, we had maintained the grudging support of the player community through A.K.’s efforts. But now the remaining members of the WildWorks community team, overwhelmed with grief, couldn’t keep up with player demands and questions. The Discord community became increasingly antagonistic as in-game bugs went unfixed and players weren’t hearing from the dev team through A.K. as they’d come to expect.
We continued releasing premium content for Feral, but by Spring 2021 deficit spending on Feral development had fully outrun our cash position. We had to lay off part of the team and suspend development of Feral until we could secure new capital. We announced this decision in the Feral Discord on July 30 with this message:
The majority of the player community was disappointed by this announcement, but supportive overall and relieved that the game would not be shutting down. A small but very vocal minority, however, became extremely hostile and antagonistic towards the dev team. With a few exceptions, these were players who’d been deeply engaged with the game for months but had been unwilling to pay for the experience; this made their level of vitriol especially perplexing, considering few had ever spent any money to play. Yet a significant cohort of players continued to play Feral, and we maintained our weekly analytics reports to our partners throughout 2021.
We continued to pursue every possible avenue to secure new capital throughout this period, up to and including offering the company for sale. The $5M loan from Chicago was coming due in 2022, lending additional urgency to these efforts. We came very close to closing a couple of these deals, but would fail in the diligence process when investors became aware of the odious terms of the Chicago debt instrument. By late 2021 we were facing another layoff and a return to Feral development seemed increasingly unlikely — even if we had the funding, we were losing team members whose expertise would be nearly impossible to replace. That’s when we hit upon a desperate, last ditch plan to save Feral.
I’d observed the surge of interest in blockchain gaming throughout 2021, and talked to colleagues at other companies who were having success with NFTs as an alternative fundraising vehicle for game development. I conceived of a new Web3 game called Cinder, prototyped with the Feral assets and code base, but with a very different design direction. Cinder would feature NFT avatars and a combat-oriented game loop, using the existing Feral environments and character models as a springboard to jump-start development. NFT sales would fund Cinder development and Cinder game revenue would fund the resumption of Feral; and since they were rooted in the same code base, much of the work on Cinder would carry over to Feral anyway. We outlined this idea for the Feral Discord community, expecting a warm reception to any plan that would enable us to resume Feral development. I was wholly unprepared for the response we actually received.
The Feral demographic was unique. It was a particular haven for marginalized and dispossessed teens who were drawn to online communities themed around fantasy art, animal cosplay, and (frequently, but not always) condemnatory online activism. A particular target of their ire in 2021 was NFTs, as stories spread that the work of admirable online artists was being stolen and exploited by NFT profiteers. When WildWorks announced its intention to leverage some of the assets we created for Feral in a new game with NFTs, the response was apoplectic. I received death threats, threats to bomb our offices, and a sustained yearlong campaign of online attacks; some of them quite vile. The most determined of this cohort used the Feral Discord and the game itself to coordinate attacks against WildWorks’ employees, server infrastructure, business relationships, and customers.
We made energetic efforts to reconcile with this element of the Feral community; inviting them into the development process, hosting online AMAs, publishing FAQs and articles, offering free access to both games, and otherwise seeking to understand and address their concerns. We reached an impasse around two issues they found irreconcilable with their beliefs: (a) Cinder incorporated NFTs and all NFTs are evil, and (b) Cinder would repurpose some environments and other assets from Feral, which was their game. A particularly strident group of players accused us of using the money they’d spent in Feral to fund the development of Cinder. Ironically, though, Feral’s revenue had never been able to sustain its own operating costs, much less any development, and it was Cinder that would enable Feral to continue limping along in the hope we could finish building it.
By the end of 2021, the Feral game servers and Discord channel were split between fans of the game who primarily wanted to see it completed and sustained, and a group who primarily wanted to see WildWorks fail for its perceived betrayal. We spun Cinder out of WildWorks as a separate company, with its own staff, management, and investors, and returned WildWorks’ focus to the development and growth of Animal Jam. Feral had ceased generating revenue altogether by this point, and the game world was degenerating into a rally point for our antagonists to discuss and coordinate attacks on our company and staff. I had received some horrifying threats throughout this period, but after similar attacks were directed at Wildworkers who bore no responsibility for the company’s decisions, I directed the team to shut down the Feral servers and Discord channel in February of 2022.
Let me be abundantly clear on one point: I am responsible for the decisions that led to Feral’s development, the mistakes that undermined its success, and the decision to shut it down. That’s not to diminish the efforts and importance of the rest of the WildWorks management team — but at the end of the day, as the CEO, it was my arrow in the albatross. It was also my decision to pivot to the Cinder web3 project, partially in the hope that our work on Cinder game code would stabilize the same scaffolding used by Feral, and give us time to secure the funds to finish Feral properly.
And dammit, we came so close. If the CCP crackdown in Hong Kong came a few weeks later, if the Covid travel ban happened a few DAYS later, we might be planning Feral’s 5th birthday party right now and the kids we wanted to serve would have a thriving community instead of bitter memories.
And god, if we could have reached through the isolating strictures of Covid quarantine to hug A.K when they needed it.
Hindsight renders business errors as glaring and unmistakable. Accounts of product failures in the tech press exacerbate the effect; we read them and wonder how executives so dense came to run a company in the first place. What gets lost in the snark and schadenfreund is the vision the creators were pursuing of a particular user experience; the mental picture they were chasing of how people would interact with the product, the surprise and delight it would produce. Those visions are mind altering drugs. They distort your perception of time, space, and distance. The product always looks closer to reaching the vision than it actually is, the target market looks bigger, the technical barriers look smaller.
We invested millions of dollars of our own and investors’ money in the development of Feral, and our studio was united in its excitement about the game design and the opportunity to continue serving a generation of kids who’d grown up in Animal Jam and were earnestly seeking an online game community suited to their age and interests. For a while there I thought we’d hit upon something uniquely magical. The artists and designers creating Feral are among the best I’ve ever worked with. The players who engaged in the open beta were the most passionate and creative I’ve ever served. I dearly wish they’d had the chance to experience the real Feral, the complete system of game loops, narrative, social interaction, and player-generated elements that the “beta” barely hinted at.
The mistake that seems most glaring to me now is this: after we lost A.K., WildWorks’ leadership went silent. I went silent. We were all reeling, individually and as a company, and for months as the Feral community’s questions turned into frustration and resentment, all they got from me was silence. I didn’t have answers to their questions about the game, but more significantly I didn’t have the strength to rekindle the campfire A.K. had built and gather the community around it. Perhaps if I’d stepped in and talked to the Feral community directly during that time, even if I didn’t have new information to give them, there might have been a foundation of trust and goodwill to build upon when we came to them with bad news and our Hail Mary plan.
Instead, after months of silence in response to their questions and bug reports, the first thing they heard from WildWorks management was that we were taking the game assets from Feral and repurposing them for a totally alien player community. Small wonder they were incensed. If I’d been communicating with them all along, the end result might have been the same — it wouldn’t change the fact that many players would still have hated the Cinder plan, for all the same reasons. But in the climate of suspicion and fear I’d allowed to fester through silence, there was never the possibility of any other reaction.
One coda to the story of Feral, I suppose, is the story of Cinder. That isn’t my story to tell, as it passed from my management portfolio when it spun out from WildWorks into its own company. I know that Cinder Studios ran into its own buzzsaw of depredating circumstances, from Feral technical debt to the collapse of FTX, but only its day-to-day management team could say with authority what happened and why.
What prompted me to write this now, years after the end of the Feral project and my own post-acquisition exit from WildWorks, was a question I recently received from a former Feral player still hurting from the ugly implosion of that community. They asked (with what I took to be lingering resentment but might be more charitably read as simple curiosity) if in retrospect I think it was worth it. The pivot from Feral to a NFT game project, that is, though it would be fair to ask of the Feral project as a whole. I felt like that deserved an answer, and I found I couldn’t articulate the answer without filling in some gaps in the project’s history.
Was the pivot to Cinder “worth it?” Of course not, if that decision could have been made with all the information we have now. Ultimately it caused more pain to my team, our families, our players, and our investors than would have been felt by simply shuttering Feral development altogether and moving on before the project ran out of money. And that’s the funny thing… the pivot to Cinder made business sense at the time, and genuinely seemed the best way to fulfill the promises we’d made to our players. What didn’t make business sense at the time was continuing Feral development after our B-round fell through in early 2020 and the world went into lockdown. That was the sort of maverick, all-in bet that looks brilliant if it pans out and utterly asinine if it doesn’t, like going for it on fourth down from your own end zone. Cinder made sense; Feral itself (by that time) did not.
The subtext of the Feral player’s question was whether I still think the association with blockchain technology was worth it. My answer there is yes, although I certainly wish I’d understood how our existing players felt about it before announcing Cinder to them. Secure public ledgers and non-fungible tokens will continue evolving as important component technologies for some types of games, ultimately to the benefit of players. Token launches will evolve as a viable fundraising vehicles for indie devs, ultimately to the benefit of original game development. Yes, these have been plagued by scams and grifters, but bookmark this and see if the same isn’t generally acknowledged of today’s AI startups in three years.
“Blockchain gaming,” however, is not a thing and never will be in a meaningful sense — any more than “SQL database gaming” or “bounding box collision gaming” is a thing. Blockchains are background technologies that will make sense in some games and not in others. Since leaving WildWorks I have been involved in a few projects that touch on intersections between blockchain technologies and games, one of which will be announced publicly soon. To the extent these technologies will enable players to do things in games they couldn’t before, they will succeed… and in doing so will disappear. No game will succeed at mainstream scale simply by virtue of being a “blockchain game” or “cryptogame.” But we will see very successful mainstream games that incorporate non-fungible tokens without players ever knowing or caring that’s what they’re interacting with. That’s how background technologies are supposed to work.
In conclusion I owe more than one apology to the players of Feral who embraced that game world, saw the magic we saw, and really, really wanted to play in it. This rumination on the history of the project is in part a way to manifest those apologies, and I hope it provides some closure for those who were hurt by our failure to deliver on the vision we offered them. It’s too glib by far to say, “well, that stuff happens in the games business.” It does, and usually not because of any fraudulent intent on the part of the creators. But it happens as the result of decisions made by people in charge, and as one of those people, I acknowledge that Feral players never got the explanations they should have in the moment. They might fairly criticize this now as coming far too late, but it’s not a story I felt I could tell while still part of the WildWorks board, and better it be told now than not at all.
Res ipsa loquitur, maybe.
